Empowerment and Organization

Do you feel empowered by your leader in your organization?

Empowerment in organization has two essential enabling factors:

• Unilateral goodwill from people with power, and
• Effective and efficient democratic oversight that puts them in check and, therefore, places the rest in power.

Without the first, empowerment merely doesn’t happen.

Without the second, you are only lucky to be empowered.

Trust Happens, But How Does It Sustain?

Think about your best friend (let’s say it’s a he). If I ask you, “what if he is a dangerous, evil person and broke into your house and did unspeakably bad things to your family?”

You probably would think – no, no, I know him too well and trust him that he would never do that, and, by the way, even if he did, he’d be arrested, wouldn’t he?

Trust happens all the time. While trust sustains not just because it happens all the time, but also because the rule of law in a society is also at the back of your mind. In fact, more often than not, it’s exactly that relative peace of mind that afford trust to happen frequently and positively.

In other words, there is a legal foundation that leads to relative confidence in any social relationship – regardless of whether you are consciously aware of it.

If we ask, “what if the police are the people who exploited the system and intentionally wronged us?” The answer immediately becomes tricky – who would you rely on when the rule of law becomes unreliable? What if the government is corrupt?

Unilateral goodwill is not enough to sustain trust in society.

Trust needs both goodwill and confidence.

Democratic Oversight and The Rule of Law

Embarrassingly, unilateral goodwill is often the only thing you get in an organization, where trust happens but it doesn’t necessarily sustain. That’s because – more often than not – there’s no enforceable “rule of law” to really keep you at peace at the back of your mind.

In other words, there’s no foundation, legal or otherwise, that ensures your confidence in an organization.

That “rule of law” is democratic oversight. “Democratic” to ensure collective confidence; “oversight” to keep power in check.

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t have effective and efficient democratic oversight in place. It’s probably not even a stretch to say that most organizations don’t have it at all!

The lack of democratic oversight has profound impact on the kind of incentives that can happen in an organization.

Some of us live in a democratic society full of authoritarian organizations who have authoritarian rules, structures and processes.

Authoritarian Organizations

In many organizations, most policies, processes, and frameworks describe a chain of authority. There are often a series of approvers, situated linearly on top of a chain of power from authority to subordination.

So what if any of those approvers is wrong? If the answer is nothing, and there’s no mechanism to put powerful, decision-making people in check, then that’s authoritarian. If such a mechanism exists but it’s not effective and efficient, then we end up with an authoritarian organization.

When most rules, structures and processes are authoritarian in an organization, empowerment is virtually irrelevant – in an authoritarian environment, you don’t in principle need to empower people to get things done.

Is that why powerful people in organization often pay lip services to “empowering employees”?

Where Is the Culture of Democratic Oversight?

For democratic oversight to happen, relationships in organization would have to go beyond authority, subordination and unilateral goodwill. For it to happen effectively and efficiently, they would also have to bind by confidence in the “rule of law” of the organization.

Most talks about leadership and culture only focus on unilateral goodwill from the leaders or the employees. None mentions how effective, efficient democratic oversight can happen.

That’s the culture of authoritarian oversight in organizations. It assumes an authoritarian “rule of law” and relies on powerful people’s unilateral goodwill to establish trust. Fundamentally, it prevents the power of authority from ever being challenged.

In other words, it goes against all the fundamental principles we cherish in a democratic society.

Paradoxically, we are mostly okay with authoritarian organizations, whereas we are mostly not okay with an authoritarian society.

How might we build a culture of democratic oversight?

I’m afraid the existing literatures on leadership and organizational culture cannot provide any legitimate answer to that.

The Road to Empowerment

Empowerment in organizations happens under two conditions:

• Goodwill from people in power (leadership) who seek mutual goodwill from others, and
• Effective and efficient democratic oversight that equally puts both sides of the goodwill in check.

The first is often achieved through politics or luck, while the second only through activism.

As long as we remain in an organizationally authoritarian system, most people in an organization will never have the power to behave democratically.

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